Last week we had solar panels fitted to our home. It’s something we’d been talking about for a long time, but either the time or the finances weren’t right. Finally we decided to bite the bullet – partly because we are taking delivery of an electric vehicle this week and so it seemed to make sense to have the panels fitted at the same time as the EV charger.
We are very pleased with the results. My husband has become obsessed with the app on this phone and is constantly checking how much electricity we are generating/using/storing. As I write this both my daughter and I are working from home and the battery is full and we’re exporting power to the grid.
It’s been a costly project, but in a few years we’ll recoup the cost in energy saved, and of course we have the nice warm glow of knowing we’re doing our bit for the planet.
I’ve just put a post on LinkedIn about the fact that Liz Drury Voiceovers is now a solar-powered studio, which I hope will be something that appeals to potential clients – or the ones that care about the environment anyway.
This got me thinking about how businesses these days like to shout about their ‘green’ credentials, and it made me wonder if, in the not-too-distant future, companies will want to shout about their ‘human’ credentials?
AI is everywhere now, and I think we can all agree that it’s here to stay, but there are still things that real humans can do better. While AI is great for speed and efficiency, it still can’t replicate the soul, empathy, or nuance of real human input. You can often tell when something—especially a voiceover—has been created by a machine. It sounds… slightly off.
Some of the time that might not matter. If someone wants to produce something really quickly for a social media post that has a short lifespan for example, then they won’t want to spend any money on it. And that’s fine if the point of it is just to get some information across. If however a business is producing a video that needs to impress their clients and which may have more longevity, then they will probably want to invest some money in it and get a real human to produce the graphics, the voiceover etc.
I am wondering whether the ‘human’ element of a business will become part of its USP in future.
Would you be more likely to choose a business if you knew it valued real people in its creative process?